The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond (13 page)

Wearing a white PICES T-shirt, his head shaded by a billed cap, Chris stepped up the risers and onto the platform. Upon his arrival at the guest speaker’s rostrum, he waved a paperback book aloft to acknowledge the thunderous applause. He would express his gratitude the way he knew best.

He leaned into the microphone mounted on the speaker’s table. “Aloha, everybody.” He doffed the cap and forced himself to smile. “I want to thank you all for being here today. It’s very important, because your presence and your energy can help save lives.” Drowned out by the raucous rejoinder of three thousand sympathizers, he waited until the group’s temperature had cooled. “I’m not gonna belabor the obvious. You’ve heard it all before. The Navy has undeniably resumed sonar testing, and now, suddenly, we have the deaths of many young humpbacks. I’ve seen the results in Maui, and it’s not a pretty sight.”

Vociferous outbursts of anti-military obscenities and a menacing display of protest-sign saber-rattling forced Chris to pause. He waved his arms to no avail, waiting for the audience to discharge its frustration. Despite the uproar, the sight of so many engaged young people brought back memories of his globe-trotting childhood as a military brat.

Once the seething spectators had settled down, Chris continued. “Now I’ll tell you all a little secret.” He reconfigured his sober visage into a tantalizing grin. The crowd grew hushed. “I spent some time in the Navy—” he heard the booing, “—and I want to thank the Navy for giving me the opportunity to discover the amazing mammals thriving in our oceans. The first time I experienced a humpback’s underwater song, it felt like a baptism in a font of liquid vibration and sound. In that very moment, I knew I’d devote my life to their study and to marine mammal education.”

Taking a deep breath, he said, “I’m simply hooked on humpbacks.” Wisps of laughter stirred the air. “I’d like to read an excerpt from an essay I co-authored in a recent PICES publication. It’s written in rather formal language, so please bear with me.” He thumbed to a bookmarked page in the paperback he grasped. “By the way, these books are informative and the proceeds pay for PICES research.”

“Go, Brother!” The husky, Island-accented voice emerged from the background buzz.

Chris replied with his hand raised in the shape of the shaka sign. In a calm and measured cadence, he began to read. “‘Of the thousands of mammalian species that ever existed, only a handful has completed the evolutionary round-trip from the watery womb, to the world of land and sky, then back. About fifty million years ago, the land-dwelling ancestors of modern whales perplexingly reversed course and boldly returned to their ancestral home. Although today’s hydrodynamically sculpted whales are able to cruise the oceans with elegant efficiency, the lineage of these giants is more closely related to the camel and the hippo, and their anatomies retain vestiges of their four-legged forebears. By their irrevocable action, their descendants are compelled to surface every fifteen minutes of their waking lives to sustain the oxygen of life. They must have achieved an enormous selective advantage to justify a plight akin to the emphysema patient forever tethered to the oxygen cylinder.’”

As he paused to let his remarks register with the listeners, Chris sensed a barometric shift in the mood of the crowd. The aura of a tranquil hum had enveloped the multitude. Many of the children had stopped playing and were nestled into their parents’ laps.

“‘Evolution continued upon its merry course, and the limbs so useful on land transitioned into fins and flukes better suited to propulsion in the water. The fin of the humpback whale is the largest pectoral appendage in the animal kingdom.’” He branched both arms. “‘Biologists, inspired by its remarkable proportions, named the humpback species, in the lingua franca of the Linnaean classification system, Megaptera novaeangliae, the giant-winged New Englander.’”

Since he was about to embark upon more sophisticated concepts, he shifted to a more leisurely pace. “‘On land, creatures of this immensity would be mired in a gravitational well. Their act of repatriation, back to their pelagic origins, was a masterstroke, since their massive bodies could literally defy gravity. The synergies of buoyancy and a bountiful food supply enabled an evolutionary positive feedback loop of burgeoning body size, a bigger skull, and an ever-expanding brain. Humankind is conditioned to view the culture of the sea from our anthropocentric fishing-for-primitive-creatures perspective. The big-brained humpbacks, however, have behaviors similar to their sapient terrestrial counterparts: children to raise, food to catch, and songs to sing.’”

Chris paused again as the song of the humpback whale streamed from the speakers and resonated in his ears. Many in the audience closed their eyes, their faces expressing rapture. Some of the children bounced up and down, spread their arms, and whirled like dervishes.

He resumed reading. “‘The evolution of humans and whales proceeded to bequeath another distinguishing advantage: brain tissue sheathed in intricate convolutions of cerebral cortex that, for humans, has enabled the creation of symbols useful in thought experiments and communications. For Homo sapiens on the land, this process has transpired for less than a million years and has generated the self-proclaimed ‘extraordinary’ three-pound computer brain we know and love so well. For Megaptera in the sea, the evolutionary recipe has simmered for a span of thirty million years, spawning the massive cranium that encases a fourteen-pound brain endowed with a copious quantity of gray matter. One can only wonder what capabilities nature has bestowed upon the cetacean mind.’”

“One can only wonder,” swirled throughout the audience like a ceremonial chant.

Chris was taken aback, pausing until the repetitions had faded in intensity. He signaled to someone off stage, and the song of the humpback infused the air once again. “Let’s imagine the possibilities while meditating upon their mesmerizing songs.”

He’d waited until the song had played for a full minute. “Thank you.” Gorman’s quiet finale caught many by surprise. Their delayed reaction crescendoed into a torrent of applause. He bowed repeatedly, then announced above the din, “Please log into the PICES website and sign the petition to halt all sonar testing in Hawaiian waters! Mahalo!”

While waving a goodbye, the master of ceremonies reappeared and grabbed Chris’s arm, raising it in a linked salute. With the crowd still in an uproar, Joe shouted into the hand-held mike, “Thank you, Christopher Gorman! The next speaker on the program is RUSH activist Bill Baldwin!”

Once Gorman had disappeared, slender William Baldwin jumped up onto the stage, pumping a fist with the gusto of an athlete’s victory celebration. In stark contrast to his purple, tie-dyed T-shirt, his carrot-top hair flamed in the harsh sunlight.

“It’s an honor to ride Brother Gorman’s wake. He’s not only a dedicated researcher and educator; he’s one of the quintessential secular humanists of our times. His poetic portrayal of the majestic humpbacks is pure inspiration. Excuse the pun, but I get a rush at every one of Christopher’s talks. However, words can only take us so far. I represent RUSH, the Radical Ultra-Secular Humanist movement, and we put words into action! We’re dedicated to stopping government and corporate exploitation of earth’s most magnificent creatures.” He belted out the phrases like a seasoned politician. The crowd bellowed its approval.

With sleight-of-hand proficiency, Baldwin lofted a shiny, white canister into the air, and then pointed it toward the microphone. “Hear for yourselves what the Navy’s doing to the whales.” Like the blast of an eighteen-wheeler’s horn, a mind-numbing howl exploded from seemingly everywhere. A thousand souls reacted instinctively with hands pressed to ears and faces contorted in pain. After five interminable seconds, Baldwin mercifully doused the sonic inferno. His voice penetrated the ear-ringing silence. “I’m sorry to have discomforted you. This sports air-horn generates 115 decibels of sound energy. Yet the Navy’s pulses of underwater sonar are hundreds of times more powerful. Need I say more?”

The crowd replied with an angry roar.

Baldwin shook his arms and shouted into the microphone. “RUSH leadership stands united with the other eco-movement representatives to express our outrage! It’s time to put an end to anthropocentric fascism or, in other words, our species ego trip. Did you know the blue whale, the largest creature that has ever lived, was driven to the edge of extinction by whalers? Did you know humans killed over two million whales during the twentieth century?” In this rhetorical fashion, Baldwin besieged the audience with a litany of sobering accusations. Like the chorus of the faithful at a religious revival, the crowd answered back after each question, delirious with indignation.

“Greenpeace protests aren’t getting it done,” he continued. “The eco-enemies need a fist-in-the-face reminder of their role in the slaughter of earth’s endangered marine mammals. Now is the time to show the whole world what’s really going down. Let’s link hands and march to the gates of the oppressors! Our symbolic blockade will tell them to cease their killing ways. Save the Whales! Let’s move out!”

With the bravado of a hang-glider pilot launching from the edge of a cliff, Baldwin leapt from the stage and was snared in the net of his front-row devotees’ linked arms. His prostrate figure was borne aloft and then passed overhead from person to person. Soon back on the terra firma, Baldwin cranked an arm forward and shouted, “Follow me!” The mob resounded with a fierce cheer.

A lone drummer beat the solemn rhythm heard at military funerals while the parade of humanity marched resolutely toward its destination. At least two hundred RUSH loyalists trailed in Baldwin’s footsteps, chanted protest slogans, and screamed for justice. A phalanx of security guards waited to greet them as they approached the main gate to Pearl Harbor Naval Station. With the crowd surging forward, their shiny shields, helmets, and batons broadcast an intimidating warning.

Baldwin shouted into a bullhorn, “Everybody stop here.” Once everyone had settled in, he cried, “Now let’s link hands and form a chain! Nobody gets into this base until the Navy ends the sonar experiments!”

After several rounds of solidarity songs, and as the temperature climbed, the mob grew restive. When someone cried, “Let’s make fruit salad!” front line provocateurs began to hurl squishy ripe guavas and mangoes.

“Yeah! Let’s give ’em Hawaiian punch!”

Ruby red and yellow splashes of fruit pummeled the linked array of transparent plastic shields. As their body armor began to resemble a Jackson Pollock canvas, the guards’ friendly faces turned angry.

“Viva the whales!” a young woman shouted.

“Yeah! Let’s get ’em,” screamed a disheveled youth wearing a RUSH T-shirt. Then, beer bottles propellered through the air, crashed into shields, and shattered into glistening shards like Hawaiian shave ice. The sprays of spittle, the showers of glass, the rain of curses, and the clashing of bodies—these were the primal elements precipitating the tipping point in human relations. Billy clubs answered back, battering human flesh, and the blood of one species was shed in protest against the bloodshed of another.

T
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EST AND THE
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RIGHTEST

SoCalSci University, Department of Engineering, Los Angeles, California—mid-January

“Good morning, Seema and Andrew,” said Dmitri. “It’s great to be back home.” SoCalSci was his home, he thought. His students were his family. “Grab some chairs.”

Southern California’s mid-winter, morning sunshine poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Professor David Dmitri’s second floor office, illuminating the faces of his two stellar graduate students. Seema Roy and Andrew Chu removed the piles of paper gathering dust atop two ergonomic guest chairs and settled down for their weekly advisory session. It was their first meeting in nearly a month, since before the winter break campus shutdown.

“Hey, boss,” said Andrew, “seems like your vacation paid off. You look tanned, rested, and ready to go for our next handball match.” He flexed an arm in a muscle-man pose.

Dmitri shook his head in feigned exasperation. Today, more than usual, he enjoyed Andrew’s playfulness as a counterpoint to the usual academic chitchat and to his own darkened thoughts about the whales still perishing in Maui.

“I adore your shirt,” said Seema, referring to the floral-red, silk-print shirt Dmitri had found in Lahaina. She touched a finger to her temple. “My sixth sense also tells me that you had a transformative experience in the Islands, possibly even a romantic encounter.”

Seema’s teasing smile and lilting voice delighted peers and colleagues alike. Her willowy figure reminded Dmitri of a classical dancer’s, and her large, dark eyes revealed an innate curiosity. Seema’s calming British-Indian accent relaxed him during their meetings. Her accurate hunch, however, reignited his concern about Melanie. He knew she’d be shaken by the news of the mounting humpback death toll. He willed himself to appear at ease.

“I was going to inquire about your holidays, but since you mentioned it, I did indeed have a transformative series of encounters. Since I’ve returned with materials for a new line of inquiry, let’s temporarily suspend your current research activities. I’d like you to conduct a brief investigation for me.”

Dmitri’s students exchanged expressions of concern. Andrew spoke first. “But, boss—”